This Is Not A Happy Post

This isn’t going to be a happy post. There isn’t a nice ending to this story. There isn’t any neat resolution or a cheerful reminder to stay positive. This is me, trying so hard to make my life better, and the universe flipping me off and sauntering away without looking back.

We (my wife and I) recently had an amazing opportunity. One of her dad’s long-time friend wanted someone in her house. She doesn’t live there, but it’s a historical landmark, so she was having a hard time selling it. We originally told her we could just live there for a few months so that someone was there, but then she started talking about how she has been wanting to run an antique shop out of the house. So we told her that we would love to do that. My wife has always wanted to run her own business, a cafe, and we figured it would be easy to add espresso to an antique shop. We’ve been planning for a while now. We came up with figures for how much we’d need to spend to start it, how much we’d need to make to break even. We told her that we would love to buy the house from her, since that was her end goal anyway. She seemed on board for everything we’ve said.

Today we were supposed to meet with her to look at the house and then sit down to talk about what our plan was and how we would go about buying the house through her instead of a bank, because I don’t have that kind of credit yet. We left it up to her when we would meet, since she’s the one that has to drive over. Out of the blue she texted us and said that she didn’t want to meet with us. She didn’t want to rent the house out, and she couldn’t afford to front us until we got the business up and running. Without any context, the dream that we’d been building up for so long got yanked out from under us.

I am trying to be positive about this. We’re not starting over. We have everything that we had before we were planning to start this. What we have sucks, though. We have a car that we were forced into buying at an unreasonable interest rate because we were desperate. We have a shitty, shitty apartment, without a working shower, with bugs and drafts and a stove that only works half the time. We have two maxed out credit cards. We have jobs that we deeply hate going to every day. We have school debt. We have no idea what to do now.

After the idea of a three story house and a business that we could call our own, going back to what we have seems almost impossible. But we’re going to have to do it. And that sucks.